Guardian relies on user input to trawl expenses claims
The Guardian website - the digital arm of the national British newspaper - has revealed that over 20,000 users have taken part in an innovative user-generated digital project designed to investigate MP’s expense claims.
The British broadsheet called upon its readership to help reporters examine documents chronicling expenses claims made by Members of Parliament. The newspaper asked users to search through 450,000 pages of claims over the last four years. The website,
Investigate Your MP’s Expenses, gave users the opportunity to flag any suspicious claims, which were then investigated by journalists. Around 16,000 pages have been examined.
Crowd-sourcing search method
The exercise – known as crowd-sourcing – has seen a number of previously unreported claims come to light. These include a claim made by a male MP for a woman’s handbag. A request to reimburse the purchase of a £255 pen has also been discovered.
The statement on the Guardian website reads:
“We hope that many hands can make light work of the thousands of documents released by Parliament in relation to MPs’ expenses. We, and others - perhaps you? - are using these tools to review each document, decide whether it contains interesting information, and extract the key facts.”
Janine Gibson, editor of
Guardian.co.uk said the experiment aimed to encourage user participation in the newsgathering process. She said:
“There are no guarantees that we'll discover any more expenses scandals through this online experiment. But, regardless of that, we hope that our site will prove extremely valuable in making this information as transparent as possible, and enabling the public to actively use the information, rather than just look at it."
